The following brief summary of roughly a thousand years of historical events that led to the evolution and end of the Serenissima adopts the traditional historical methods and attempts to provides reasons for the Venetian Republic’s economic policies and the history of the city and its citizens.

We do not claim that this interpretation of the city’s history is the only or best way of viewing events in order to understand how individuals evolved over the course of the centuries (Preface of the collection "General History of Africa" by Amadou-Mahtar M'bow, Director General of UNESCO from 1974 to 1987). Rather the opposite: we hope to encourage “readers” to draw parallels between our potted history and those by other historians, to discover the reasons for any differences and to assess for themselves all the possible different interpretations.

The concept of ‘discontinuity’ is used to split history into different periods. For instance, the Roman Empire with its clear-cut territory, politics and economics is followed by the Middle Ages, whose main aspect was the splitting up of Europe into small independent states.

- rev. 0.1.11